Tuesday, April 17, 2012

All Keyed Up and Excited!

Today's post features three entries in the Kissed Again! contest from Mary Anderson of Washington.

Mary fell in love with the Art Deco peeping keyhole scan and you can see more of her jaw-dropping combinations in the FrenchKissed Flickr group.

She took the two scans you see above and voila! Well, it wasn't as easy or instant as "voila!" may make it sound. Even if you don't create digitally in Photoshop, you'll smile all the way through Mary's explanation of how she merged these two images....

Art Deco Lovers Framed in Keyhole

" I pulled the keyhole into Pixlr photo editor to add their emboss filter cause I love playing and seeing what funky and psychedelic colors I can turn both the color of the main keyhole, but more especially the gold lines. Embossing makes those lines become raised and look like glitter and as you play with hue and/or saturation (or both) you can happily waste countless hours changing, saving, changing the sliders again, saving, changing some more, saving....or maybe I'm just too easily amused, I'm not sure which. :0) Let's see where was I? Oh, yeah, I forced myself to quit playing with Pixlr and took my newly embossified/glitterfied keyhole cutout and place it over the top of the Art Deco couple. I played with placement that was pleasing to the eye. In the meantime, Trishia, unbeknownst to me, was playing with this same Art Deco couple and prettifying their skin. Mind you, prior I thought their skin looked good, but now that I saw the pretty peachy tones she was able to make them, I had to have this newly dewy skin color in my project EXCEPT we have now both discovered that rhinoplasties are to be left to the EXPERTS!!! [From Trishia: in the process of clearing away the excess purple stain on the couples' face, it was revealed that the Frenchman had the nose of ... a Frenchman:)]

I never knew before what kind of artistry is encapsulated in the humble nose. Here-to-for, I just thought it did a dandy job of taking in oxygen for me and smelling the heavenly scent of garlic bread and other pleasant things. It also is ever so easy to just pinch it off if there's an awful smell, and bingo, problem solved! Other than that, I've considered my nose a humble little organ. Wow! I now am in awe of my nose and will never take it for granted AGAIN!!! I won't incriminate myself on how many hours exactly I spent trying to make the, to me, by now very pesky Art Deco Man's nose to look normalish, as I was supposed to be doing other more productive things.....[shhhhh, don't tell my family on me. :-)] But, too many hours later, I decided I had to stop or I was going to drive myself mad! So, um, let's see, I flattened my, by now, bajillon layers in Photoshop, saved this project and sent it off to Trishia to be entered in this contest. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!"

And as for this lovely Victorian Lady in Purple, Mary explains ...

"Um, let's see....ditto, ditto, ditto til I get to the opening newly prettified/glitterized keyhole. Then I chose my Victorian girl and pasted her to the keyhole window. I played around with where I wanted her to sit in her keyhole. Then, I chose my other elements that just seemed to kinda go together. The butterfly was my first choice. It already was a purple, but I did tweak the hue just a tad more to make sure it blended with the keyhole colors and the Victorian girl's dress. Next I chose the music score as I decided my girl had a decided fondness for music. Next came the giant hyacinth flowers and then I played around with a few elements until I lit upon the flower "ribbon." Next she had to have a key to lock all her secrets all safe and finally, the old fashioned shoe. I'll tell on myself here. I actually started out with just the shoe in the lighter under layer color. Thought I was done and flattened the whole picture. Turned my machine off for the night, went to bed. When I got up the next day, opened it up again, decided ooops, I don't like the color of that shoe as much as I thought late last night. Uh oh, double oopps, I didn't save my file with its layers. I can't take off that shoe. Hmmm, what am I going to do? I went back to get another shoe, tweaked hue/saturation to a green more pleasing and put it over the top of the original shoe. Hey, I kinda like it a bit offset, hmmm, I really like that. Oh, I meant to do that! Shhh, no one will ever know I didn't! Re-flattened, saved, and the rest is history. :-)"

Paris Vibrant in Red

Although there's no keyhole here, you will see that Mary used five different FrenchKissed scans to create this collage: Hotel Marie, Pink Paris, Paris I, Place de Republic and Calligraphy Receipt. Once again, she merged layer upon layer, cut away areas, re-pasted and layered again, using special effects like inner/outer glow and drop shadow. Mary says, "I just had so much fun doing this and it just flowed!"

Royalty and Commission-Free Images for Commercial Use

Personal Use Digital Printables

One Kind Word ...

FrenchKissed in your Email Box!

About Me

I've been a Francophile ever since taking Ms. Priddy's French class in Vidor High School. I restore antique French postcards and resell them as digital scans. I adore the Golden Age of Postcards and all the history of that time.....